Winter Dreams
by DonutPotter
Summary: Harry, Ron and Hermione talk about dreams during the summer they spend with the Order at Grimmauld Place.


All the characters/references of course belong to JK Rowling.

This just came to me and asked to be written down.

The summer they spent at Grimmauld Place, the summer before Sirius had died and before the war had started proper, but after it had begun, and after Harry found out what that meant, felt more like a winter.

Yes the tension and the unhappiness and the stuffiness, all of them trapped in that cursed house, suggested a summer where the rains didn't come and the heat never broke.

But there was also silence in corners, and draughty spaces amongst all the rooms, which held all the students in their beds each morning, tucked in. If it had truly been reflective of summer, surely they would have been up and eager for fresh air and the sun of the day, already high in the sky.

Hermione speculated that the lack of the sky, the lack of light, made it feel more like winter. Ron had never spent a summer away from his childhood home, with its fields and trees and long sunny evenings and his mother's food and the pond a mile from the house, where they had all learnt to swim. Because of that, he assumed he could only feel summer with all these things, and that summer was a place he visited, as opposed to visited him.

As for Harry, and as usual, his reasoning was less reasoned and more tortured. His unconscious world set the tone far more than his conscious those weeks at Grimmauld Place. He knew it, the "adults" knew, Ron and Hermione knew it, but for all that nothing could be done for it. The tone was winter.

Harry's unconscious was disturbed. In the past, there had been flying motorcycles and green flashes, and then audio that had been collected from Dementor visions, but all these things hadn't been truly disturbing, and had been manageable in the conscious hours.

Now the graveyard stood front and centre, and there pain and death walked. On night three of Harry's stay, and night three of Ron waking up to Harry screaming, Ron had absently wondered why he had to suffer sleep deprivation as well; Grimmauld Place lacked for a lot of things, but not rooms to rest your head. The thought was quickly dismissed, but even Ron at fifteen could see that his presence didn't help. Perhaps his mother, or even Sirius, thought that Harry would like a person in the room, but that sickening moment when Harry jerked awake each time only became worse when he realised he had to keep himself together for company. Not that Ron wished it that way, but it was that way, and had always been that way. Again an absent thought, Ron wondered if that was something innate to Harry, this aversion to sharing any feeling, or if that was something learned from his years with the Dursleys. He hadn't wanted the answer to that one.

And so in that summer that was a winter, Harry suffered at night and struck out during the day, and never shared how he was feeling about it, and was never allowed to even examine with himself how he was feeling, because Ron was in the next bed.

There was one moment in those weeks that Ron and Hermione caught a glimpse. Hermione knew this about Harry – there were moments, and it seemed he was very aware of them, that he showed more of himself. Unlike Ron, Hermione didn't speculate as to the cause of Harry's careful nature. As a result, the rare privilege they were allowed felt so precious and so fragile that she wrote them all down. She probably shouldn't, but she did. When Harry had talked about the cupboard, once when they were all in second year, brewing that potion, afterwards she had written in her notebook only "cupboard". A record of things only she could understand, but also needed to make physical so as she would always remember. Hermione knew this was part of who she was.

They were the three of them in the drawing room, after they had de-darkened, de-spelled, de-doxied and cleaned the room. As a result, it wasn't too bad. They'd unearthed a fireplace and set it going whenever they were in there, as the room had a chill otherwise, in that Winter-Summer. Thinking on it, Harry could count maybe twice it had only been the three of them. Normally the other Weasleys, Ginny at a minimum, would be around. He couldn't blame her, and didn't mind it, except that at Hogwarts he was so used to having time, whether in the library or walking on the grounds or even in the common room, where it was just Ron, Hermione and himself. They were the Gryffindor three; they weren't bothered, and they didn't bother. He didn't use the word family in his head, but only because he didn't have frame of reference as to what that felt like.

"What were you dreaming about last night, Harry?" Ron asked, not looking at Harry but ahead, into the flames. They had been conversing about not much, and it had been quiet for a few minutes. Hermione had an old potions text book open, and was quietly scratching away some notes. Upon this question, she stopped and looked at Ron. What had she missed last night, because she hadn't been in the room, was never in the room?

Silence from Harry, also looking ahead, into the flames.

"Only….," Ron continued, sounding quite unlike himself really, "It sounded different. And I know it's weird that I know what your nightmares sound like, but I do, and they all sound the same, but this one was different. And with the others I know, but this one…"

More silence. Hermione was holding her breath. Two years ago, even a year ago, she would have already interrupted.

"Sorry," Ron again.

"No, don't be sorry. It's a fair question. Like you say, you know what it sounds like," Harry finally replied. Hermione exhaled quietly. Ron's head flickered, as though to turn to Harry, but stayed on the flames at the last second.

To Hermione, Harry looked so _even_. Was that even a descriptive term? His face stayed content, neutral, his eyes still on the fire, but open in their gaze; a clearing of his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing slightly.

"Normally… normally it's the graveyard. And it's bad, but at least I can understand where it comes from… it makes sense. Last night…."

Again the quality of silence is winter, is thick, is just them. The intimacy here is why they are the Gryffindor three, unbothered and unbothering.

"It was a different one. Very different…"

Harry pauses for longer now, and then when he speaks it's as though he can't stop the torrent spilling out, as though it exists in one piece only, but again it's so _even_ , so _Harry_ in the emotions.

"I'm in a courtyard. Maybe courtyard isn't the right word… a concrete area, in amongst warehouses, very industrial. And very abandoned. The sky is really grey. And there's a dead woman. She's young. Well, older than us now, but young. I'm next to her. On my knees. I can't really remember what happened before in the dream, or if my dream-self is just remembering what happened before… but somehow I know this woman was just killed by Death Eaters. The war is full-on raging, and the light-side is losing, has already lost really. There are just pockets of resistance left, more terrorists now, in the history that's being re-written. And somehow, I know that this was woman was… is… important to me. That I had been very angry at her, but she's dead now, and I couldn't save her. And it's starting to rain.

The thing is, and it seems so weird because it's a dream, and even as I say it it's all slipping away, but it felt so real, and all these things I _knew_ like I really was there, and I'm really remembering. I'm slumped on my knees in the rain by this dead woman, and I know that the reason I was angry at her is that she was pregnant, and I had been as angry at myself for letting that happen.

Angry that we could have been so stupid as to bring a child into a world that was all but ended, certainly for people who believed what we believed. And now she's dead beside me, with our child dead inside her, and suddenly the anger becomes despair. And all that anger had been hiding a candle of hope – that this child could live in a better world, if I kept fighting, and that somehow we would all make it through together.

Yet now the child and mother are dead, before even you would know the woman was pregnant at all, that early. And the dream ends that way, with me sobbing, on my knees, in the now pouring rain. Sobbing because there had been the thinnest shred of hope, and I'm watching it wash away with the blood of the mother and the last hope of my house, of my family.

And then I wake up, thinking that this is the start, and that is an end".

He stops. It is so far from what Ron and Hermione had expected him to say (although, really, what would one expect?) that they are both struck dumb. They are looking at Harry now, who has looked into the fire the whole time.

Except now he looks up, to Ron.

"What did you hear, Ron? What was I saying?"

Ron struggles for a moment, swallows, and then says, "You were… it was… quiet, mostly. Like you said… sobbing. And you kept saying a name. Caroline".

Ron sounds strained. He almost whispers the name, as though there is a something sacrosanct about it. Hermione mouths the name, feels the sound of it in her mouth, and then bites her lip.

Harry is looking at the fire again. "Caroline," he says. "Caroline".

He speaks as though neither Ron nor Hermione are there, as though he's never heard it before, but also as though it's exactly as he expected. He looks to them again, and for the first time his face is slightly different; his eyes are slightly wet, his brow more lined. Then he shakes his head.

"What do you think? Pretty crazy dream huh?".

Immediately, Hermione knows he's looking for reassurance, that it's just, as he says, a crazy dream. Ron sees this as well, and jumps in.

"Of course! Who knows how the mind works, hey? You've got a lot of… stuff… to work out. And… we had macaroni for dinner, cheese causes nightmares, right? Right, Hermione?"

Ron leaps upon the macaroni as though that settles it, and Harry actually smiles. Hermione realises now she hasn't said anything during the whole encounter. She's trying quickly to process what Harry has told them, but it's so hard to understand. What's the use in disagreeing? It probably was just a dream… If any of them ever met a Caroline, maybe there would be something, but until then…

"It's true, dreams come in all forms and can be explained in lots of ways. Even Professor Vector sets some store in dreams and dream interpretation, but only from a purely psychological point of view; you know what she feels about what she calls the 'Lesser Divinations'. In fact, even Muggles have significant study into dreams. Like Ron said, there is a lot to process. Although it _has_ been disproven that cheese cause nightmares, according to…"

At this point Ron laughs, cutting her off. Somehow any tension has lifted, as quickly as it came. Ron has made a joke at the expense of Hermione being a know-it-all, following on from Harry sharing a problem. This is easy ground for all of them. Harry is smiling, and collectively they've managed to dismiss the dream.

Mrs. Weasley calls them down to set the table for dinner, and they all get up, weirdly happier than they were before (weird, Hermione thinks, because she and Ron have something more to worry about).

They don't talk about it again, but later that night Hermione writes 'Caroline' in the margin of her journal. She worries about it from time to time. Later, in the tent, she thinks about how Harry has dreamed of the war ending, and cries before she sleeps. Later than that, she sees the end of the war and speculates on different endings.

Ron wonders how it is he's never met a Caroline, but thinks often on how Harry said the name, when he was sleeping. Later, Ron thinks about how he says Hermione's name, and then how Harry says Ginny's name, on their wedding days.

And many, many years down the line, after James has left Hogwarts and Lily is head girl, Harry is at an international conference on Muggle – Wizard crime prevention cooperation, and he meets a woman named Caroline. She is like he remembers, though he's never met her before.

He wonders at the glint in her eye – because he's Harry Potter, or because in another life they were more to each other? They make conference small-talk, and nothing happens beyond that.

On the journey back to Britain, Harry wonders that if he dreamed from the beginning of an end, where is he now?


End file.
